How To Tell Your Authority Story With Kyle Gray

 

Storytelling is one of the most impactful and effective ways for founders, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to connect with their audiences and target market. For author and podcaster Kyle Gray, there is no better story to tell the world than your own authority story. Joining Mitch Russo, he shares the process of crafting such a story, which perfectly combines your origins, purpose, passions, and goals. Kyle also shares his own experiences, from discovering his superpower as a presentation coach to building a purpose-driven venture. If you want to understand your true self and enhance your self-esteem while creating a clear career path, this conversation is for you.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Tell Your Authority Story With Kyle Gray

Welcome to this moment in time when you get to chill out, tune in, and extract wisdom you can use to grow your business with your first thousand clients. If you are a coach, you are going to love what I have in store for you. My software platform is called ClientFol.io. It’s been helping hundreds of coaches save time on admin, achieve better results with their clients, and generate powerful client testimonials for the work that they do. How? It is by tracking accountability and holding clients to it.

No other platform provides you with the power to access a library of accountability questions and the places to control your clients through their own portal. This is the most elemental and important part of the system. Your client participates in the coaching process through their own portal. They do their homework, they answer their questions, and they enter their stats every week so you can track their progress. How would you like to try it for a dollar? Go to GetClientFolio.com and give it a try.

Now, on to my excellent guest and his incredible story. What do you do when an autoimmune disease cripples you? How do you find your way out? You search for a solution, but you learn to live with the suffering as you navigate a pathway to a solution. This is how my guest discovered his superpower. He uncovered the power of telling meaningful and resonating stories. He’s going to share with us exactly how you can do the same. Welcome, Kyle Gray, to the show.

Mitch, thank you so much. Before we even dive into that, ClientFol.io sounds amazing. As somebody who’s been working with high-ticket clients for a very long time, it’s amazing that people will pay you tens of thousands of dollars to work with you, and then not do their homework. You’re solving a huge problem here. I just want to give you a little bit of veneration and a shout-out. Thank you for having me on the show.

How Kyle Became A World-Class Presentation Coach

It is my pleasure. By the way, I created ClientFol.io because of that exact situation in my coaching practice. Clients would pay me tens of thousands of dollars and not follow up on what I told them to do. If a client doesn’t do their homework, I don’t allow them in session with me because there’s no point. If they haven’t done their homework, there’s nothing to discuss. If you are a coach and you do the same thing, you might make a client angry, but they’re going to love you for holding them accountable. You’re going to benefit, and they are, too. Kyle, enough of the commercial. Now, on to you. I described a little bit about what you went through. Tell me how all of this got started for you.

The path to becoming a world-class presentation coach, helping people who are way too smart for their own good bring forward the best of who they are and combine that with their experience and knowledge in a way that gets their audience to not just connect but convert, started with a couple of different threads. One, when I was younger, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. At first, I wanted to be a rockstar and a musician, and write songs that impacted people’s lives. I still have a guitar here. I still write music. I put a lot of pressure on myself, like a lot of us do these days, to make it work, perform, and all of these kinds of things.

That didn’t work out for me. I ended up souring on the craft for a little while. The next thing that I knew I wanted to do was travel the world. I found ways to go live in South America. I did an exchange in Argentina. I was learning International Relations in Spanish alongside Argentinian students, which was very difficult at first, but that provided a lot of insights and perspectives. I worked for a non-profit in Peru. While I was there, I lived in Cusco, high up in the mountains. I took a little vacation down to this place called Puerto Maldonado in the Amazon basin. I was on a several-day trek through the jungle.

On the first day, there was this incredible lake that they took us to. Caimans were swimming in the water. There was this idyllic rope swing. Being 22 years old and full of intelligence, or lack thereof, I took a swing into the water and filmed it on my camera. I got an amazing shot of me doing a terrible backflip into this water. The slightest amount of water went up through my nose and down into my belly. Five days later, I was the sickest I’ve probably ever been with something called Giardia. I’ll spare everyone the details of what that experience was like.

What happened would cascade into a lot of different problems that I wouldn’t understand for many years. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had poor gut health. This manifested as a lot of fatigue and extreme anxiety. I was getting my master’s degree a couple of years later, working three jobs, trying to start a business, and being a full-time student. I would still come home after a long day feeling like I wasn’t working hard enough, and I wasn’t good enough. I was exhausting myself in the process.

It would take several years of graduating, starting to work for a startup, and helping them with content marketing. All the while, different things started to happen. My jaw felt like it was going to fall off my face. It was clicking and locking. I would get things like what I felt was carpal tunnel. Once I took care of that, I would get something like tennis elbow. It was like fighting the Hydra from the Hercules myth, where every time you cut off one head of the beast, three more would emerge.

After five or six years of trying to solve this with a symptom-based approach, my career was growing. I became a renowned copywriter. I became a best-selling author. I started helping people write great talks. I fell in love with the art of speaking as a business growth practice. It reminded me of what it was like to be a musician on stage and create experiences for people.

I’d love to hear the story about the first time you did that for somebody. I assume maybe it was even an accident, off the cuff, or maybe not planned, but you did it. Somehow, the reaction you got was strong enough to indicate to you that this might be something special. Tell us a little bit about that moment. For me, in listening to your story, that sounds like it could have been the discovery moment of your true gift.

As I was growing in my career, I was a copywriter, helping people with content marketing and writing great sales pages for people. Through a joint venture, I met a guy who was teaching people how to speak from the stage. One thing that I was very good at was using the skills that I had to trade up into skills that I wanted. I approached this guy after taking his course. I looked at his website. I said, “You don’t have any content on your website. It says in your course that you should have content to educate people. I want to work for you and write content for you. I want to go to these speech-writing workshops.” I started learning.

Shortly thereafter, this company was growing so quickly that they hired me to be a coach for their tens of thousands of dollars multi-day workshops to position speakers as great speakers or to write speeches. I had this uncanny ability to listen very closely and deeply to somebody. They would go on and on about all of the ideas that were exciting to them. I could sift through everything that they were pouring out and hone in on the gems. I’d listen carefully, process what they were saying, and then say something concise and precise back to them. I started seeing people light up.

This was the beginning of how I did the work that I was doing. Bringing this back to the health and wellness, about a year into helping facilitate these high-end workshops, I found myself in a room full of health and wellness professionals that I had never known existed before. Up until that point, I knew about traditional medicine and going to see traditional doctors. Most of the time, they wouldn’t listen to me very much. They would send me off with a prescription for something. I wasn’t excited about this because I also had two other friends who were taken right to the brink of suicide with poor gut health issues, Lyme disease, and all of these things. I had lost a lot of faith in this.

When I found these people, I was very excited. I remember sitting next to one woman. Her name was Dr. Grace Liu. She started doing the same thing, sharing a lot of knowledge and a lot of ideas. I echoed back everything that I was hearing, and also combined a lot of my own story and my own experience with what, at the time, I discovered were gut health problems. I saw her lit up and she said, “You need to come work with me.”

We worked out an arrangement where I was helping her write her sales pages, rethink her offers, and write a great signature talk. I even ghost-wrote a book for her while she was taking me through a Hashimoto’s protocol, which is the autoimmune condition I was experiencing at the time. Within a few months, most of the pain, the fatigue, and the anxiety that I once thought I was never going to live without evaporated and faded, or at least two-thirds of it. Her business started taking off.

Her book was successful in driving clients to her business. Her talks started converting a lot better. She started growing a lot more. Finally, it was like I was carrying a backpack full of rocks for most of my life, making everything else harder. I had a clarity of mind. I remember a couple of years before this, my first life coach, as it were. I don’t like that term. He said, “What if Hashimoto’s is your superpower?” I laughed at him. I almost hung up our call at the time because I thought what he said was so absurd.

In that moment of seeing the effect that I created with this doctor, I realized that everything that I had gone through, all of the pain and the suffering and the confusion, and what was once the greatest burden and curse in my life, now set me apart. I wasn’t just another copywriter or a marketer. I could make an impact, particularly among these health and wellness experts. They were incredibly intelligent and incredibly experienced.

They had a difficult time conveying that experience in a way that would get people to pay what they were worth, which is thousands of dollars, especially when it comes to people who are used to paying insurance or expecting everything to be covered under insurance. This is a very complicated and challenging sale. It’s not just about paying people money, but about getting people to change their life and their habits, which is a much harder sale. I wish I could pay $10,000 and be instantly changed, but it doesn’t work like that.

That’s so interesting. Before I go deeper into your story with you, I want to say that we have a little bit of a parallel path in that I had a rock band in high school. I wrote a blog post many years ago explaining how the experience of having a rock band gave me all the core training I needed to be the CEO of a $30-million company. I was sixteen years old at the time. I have a feeling that once we compare notes, there’s so much in common. I will tell you this. You were right about the Hashimoto’s disease being a gift and, in a sense, your superpower.

The reason I say that is exactly why you’re here. You would never have found that woman. You might have never gotten that opportunity. All of the things that happened to you happened because of what happened to you. I hope it’s something that people tuning in to this right now can take away. There’s no really bad situation in life. You could die. That’s a bad situation. I have a phrase that I’ve been using since it was taught to me many years ago. That phrase has comforted me many times over the years. The phrase is very simple. “Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. Only you don’t know it now.”

Sifting Through The Treasures In Our Brain

At the time, you did not know that it was perfect. You had acquired that illness, only later to have it become the way you found your true calling and success in life. That was amazing. This whole incident of you meeting this woman, being healed by her, working for her, and growing her business, how long ago was that? How many years ago was that?

That was 2017.

Since then, how many experiences have you had helping people extract their story and then convert that into something that propels their life forward?

I’ve worked with hundreds in short-term bursts and in long, deep programs to help them get much better results. They’re all like I was on that call with my life coach in one way or another. The thing that I’ve discovered in eight years and hundreds of people is that we relate to our stories inappropriately. I have a theory about this. What takes for you and me to get to where we are, and the audience to get to where they are, is that we are high achievers.

As high achievers, we become addicted to our achievements. We overvalue what we know and what we’ve done. This also implies a deficiency in who we are. Early on, this is somewhat useful in helping us grind hard and get things off the ground. Once we get into the mid-six or high-seven figures, it starts to hold us back and creates a ceiling for us in a lot of ways. When we sit down to write a talk, there’s this amazing thing that happens. If we just sit down by ourselves and we’re like, “What story should I tell? What should I talk about?”, what our brain searches for is not like a perfect Google search engine. It needs to feel certain emotions to unlock certain memories.

High achievers often become addicted to their achievements and overvalue what they have done. Share on X

Most of the memories, stories, and ideas that you would want to share through the result of becoming the experienced person you are, you think, “That’s not very good. I wouldn’t want to share this vulnerable thing from the stage.” You think about what’s interesting and exciting for you. It’s like we’re sitting on this treasure chest and we’re looking all around for gold. We’re like, “Why am I so poor?” We’re lamenting because we’re sitting on the treasure chest. We don’t even realize it’s there.

That’s so cool. One of the most impactful spiritual books I ever read, and it’s many years ago, was The Alchemist. It’s exactly the story you told. I identify with that in so many ways. We all have common elements to our success stories. By the way, no matter how successful you are, and this includes Oprah, no one feels like they truly have been a success. I’ll speak for myself. There are parts of me that still don’t feel as if I’ve achieved the success that I’m capable of.

Getting Around People’s Protective Mechanisms

I remember when Tony Robbins asked Oprah that question to rate herself, she rated herself under 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. When he asked her why, she said, “I still have so much to do. I probably haven’t done it very well in the past.” I thought to myself, “If Oprah can say that, think about how much all of us have to learn as well.” Tell me now about the process itself. How do you get around people’s natural protective mechanisms to get the truth or to find that gem, that element, and that piece of gold that becomes the transformative moment for them in their story?

Just speaking to what you said about Oprah, there’s good news and bad news that will perfectly segue into the answer to your question. The bad news is that impostor syndrome is something that affects everyone at every level of success. You can’t out-earn it. You can’t out-succeed it. The good news is that the cure is always the same. If you are experiencing impostor syndrome, you are focused on yourself, your shortcomings, and your flaws. The secret and the cure are always to focus on your client.

 

That’s exactly how I get around and get people out of their own way. This is something we’ll go through a bit later on the show. There are lots of ways to do this. There are lots of frameworks for stories and teaching that are all necessary, like a martial artist needs to learn many different kicks, punches, and blocks to be effective. You can’t just have one super nice roundhouse Chuck Norris kick and expect to be able to be successful. What I do is, for the case of an authority story or an origin story, I start with the client. What are the three biggest things that your ideal client is suffering from? I’ll start to explore that.

What’s that like? What would it be like if your client were talking to somebody, their friend, at a coffee table? They haven’t heard you or heard you speak or anything like that. What language would they use? Even more so, what if this person called you at 3:00 in the morning, and they’re in a total fit of desperation? You go to them. You sit by their bedside. They’re telling you things that they’ve never admitted before, maybe not to themselves and maybe not to anyone else. What are they saying? We get deep into that.

I work like an anti-therapist. I read those words back to them because words have an energetic and emotional component to them. Simply saying words evokes feelings. Once I repeat those words to them and they explore it, I ask them what they are feeling in their body. Did they feel something in their chest, sometimes in their throat, and sometimes in their head? We go through the quality of this feeling.

Once we have arrived at that, we have a good scent and a good lock on what memories there are. I ask them, “When did you feel like this?” They say, “I never thought I would share this story before.” They talk about a moment. I challenge them. A lot of times, they have this impulse to try and teach or try and talk about how they solved the problem, rather than what the experience of the problem was. I will pressure them or put friction on them and say, “Don’t tell me how you’ve solved it. Tell me what it smelled like when you walked into that room.”

Once we hone in on a moment and key details, we can bring ourselves into a room, and we find that story, then the magic of this, which brings me back to the impostor syndrome thing, is we tell that story not exactly as it happened to us. We put the core details and the heart of that story in. We lay the client’s language over it. We use the client’s words to tell the story, not our own. All of a sudden, this story that was locked away in our memories, that we thought was a burden, and that we thought was a problem, by infusing our client’s language, takes the focus off ourselves.

This moment becomes something that we’re proud to share, that we’re proud of who we are, and that can connect with our audience in ways that we haven’t yet been able to. Without even getting on stage and going on shows or things, it changes how we relate to ourselves and allows us to see the real value in who we are. It allows many different entrepreneurs and visionaries to become visionaries again, instead of the chief fire-putting-out of their business.

By seeing the real value in who they are, entrepreneurs become visionaries instead of forever putting out fires in their ventures. Share on X

Process Of Creating An Authority Story

One of the things that Kyle and I spoke of before we started the recording was that he thought it might be a good idea to have me go through this process with him live on the show. I did start to fill out your form, Kyle.

You filled it out perfectly. You filled it out as far as we need. You are living the ClientFol.io lifestyle. You are eating your dog food by doing your homework. Once again, this is quite a rare thing. Congratulations, and thank you for that.

For the audience, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, the name of this show is Your First Thousand Clients. You know that. We’re talking to the incredible Kyle Gray. He is about to take me through his process. I want you to pay attention because this is going to be potentially life-changing if you follow along and if you take these steps on your own. Kyle, take it away.

We are going to embark on the process of creating an authority story. An authority story is something that we would use at the beginning of the podcast, the beginning of a signature talk, or even in conversation with somebody to explain who we are and why we do what we do. These are typically about 5 to 7 minutes long. They break into three different scenes.

Our first act is us experiencing the pain of our ideal client. The second act is us setting out on a journey and constructing the solution that we want for ourselves. The third scene is us experiencing the transformation and the benefit that we provide for our clients, and that they are so desperately seeking. Since you have gone ahead and filled some of these things out, we’ll jump right into creating these things.

We’re going to start with Act One. The three pain points that you listed for your audience are that revenue is flatlining or declining, not fulfilled by the work as much as before, and fearful of change on the horizon from AI, which you should be concerned about. The good news here is that what we’re about to do and what we’re about to create is your ultimate line of defense. AI can become infinitely intelligent, but what it will never be able to do is take away your experiences and your stories. That will be the last thing left to us. Afraid of losing clients, our marketplace shifts. Tell me, Mitch, when was this moment in your life, in your experience, where you were feeling this fear and uncertainty, your revenue was flatlining, and you weren’t enjoying the work like you used to?

Artificial intelligence can become infinitely intelligent, but it can never take away your experiences. Share on X

I’m happy to say, if that’s the case, that it has happened many times. It has happened throughout my business life. The very first time and the most impactful time was when I started my own software company called TimeSlips Corporation. We had a fairly successful start. We were enthusiastic about the results and the reaction our product was getting. Shortly thereafter, we were struggling. We weren’t getting sales. It seems like the lower sales went the harder we worked.

I was working seven days a week, 15 to 16 hours a day, for months and months at a time. I wasn’t changing what was happening on the revenue front. I was afraid that we’d lose the business. I was thinking at that moment in time that I could go back and get another job like I had before. I wasn’t ready to do that. I never wanted that. I hated it when I had a job. My goal was to see this through the best that I could.

Can you tell me about a specific day, either the most intense or even a typical day? It was maybe a Sunday afternoon when you were still in the office after a seven-day streak. Maybe it was 5:00 PM. You were maybe considering this, but where’s a specific moment that this essence of the story relates to?

I remember sitting. I believe it was a Sunday afternoon. I lived in a very beautiful place. I lived in a house overlooking a serene pond in the woods. I remember sitting in my “office,” which was the room above my garage. I looked out and saw the birds and the trees. I thought to myself, “I’m missing all of this. How much longer do I have to do this? Here it is Sunday, and I’m still trying to write press releases and get them out before the night is over so that Monday morning, we could potentially be in the different journals and such.” In that moment in time, I felt like that one-armed paper hanger, where I’m doing everything. I had no help because we couldn’t afford to pay for help yet. I felt as if everything depended on me.

Tell me about the garage office. Give me one little detail about that room. It seemed like there was at least one window. What else was in that room?

The roof of the garage was slanted. You could only walk through the middle of the garage, through the middle of our office. There are many times when I would lose my footing, bang my head against the spackled ceiling, and have to wipe the blood from my forehead. It was not what you might call an ideal situation. We had desks jammed in their boxes. We had a station for my partner, who was operating an IBM PC at the time. That was the programming station. My computer was what I used to write press releases and work on the documentation. The room was cramped. It was dark. It was one small window at the very end of the room that looked out on the pond.

These are great ingredients for our first act. Now, we’re going to talk about our second act. I want to make sure that these are all aligned. One of the common mistakes that I see when people are working on this is that we want to talk about the uniqueness of the process of how we get our results. It is not necessarily the results that we get, but how we get there. What we’ve said is exceptional insight into understanding the problem from a different perspective, depth of experience with over 400 businesses and consultations in different scenarios, seeing the unseen options, and discovering the flaws not uncovered by others, and how to fix them.

All of these things point to the last one. “I wanted somebody to be able to see what I couldn’t see, someone with experience to help me find my way.” I’m going over these things and interpreting what you’re saying. These all sound good. What I’m hearing from what makes you different and what you were seeking at the time was that you were so in the trenches that you could no longer have a bird’s eye perspective. There were 10,000 options of what to do. You didn’t know what stood out as the way to fix these things. You wanted somebody with a tremendous depth of experience of exceptional insight to see what you could not see and show you the pathway forward.

For the outcomes that you promise, I find unseen revenue streams that can help to monetize them with a methodology to make more money than we work together. More importantly, it is sustainable and provides you with tools and systems that help you scale where you couldn’t before. Now, we want to find another specific moment. Maybe this is with the same business.

Maybe this is a couple of businesses later, where you are able to enjoy your life because revenue streams are coming from many different places. It is a good sense of security, making more money than you ever have before. It’s a sustainable income. It’s not peaks and valleys and feasts and famines. Having tools and systems to scale beyond what you currently have, you had that help and received that help. When, Mitch, did you experience this?

Neil, my partner, and I had a running joke. The running joke was, “Are we a real business yet?” We get a great review, and the review would be very effusive about the product and the service, etc. We’d look at each other and go, “Does this make us a real company yet?” I’d say, “Not yet.” It was a running joke until one particular moment when we launched two things in the same quarter, in the same 90-day period.

We launched a new upgrade to our software. This was about four years later. Already at that time, we had tens of thousands of customers. I guess we’d call them. These customers would register their software via US mail, and then we’d get their fax number. We were able to communicate with them via fax. We had worked diligently for eighteen months on a new version of the product. We sent out a mass mailing. I think it was 25,000 pieces of mail to our existing customers and another 30,000 pieces of mail to what we would call our prospect base. To order the upgrade, you had to fill out a form and fax it in.

We had four fax machines on a table inside a very thin room. It was a narrow hallway. I woke up one morning. I came to the office. All of the fax machines were chugging away. All these orders were coming in. It was stacks and stacks of orders. I didn’t even want to go to my office. I just wanted to sit there and watch the fax machines as all this money came rolling in from customers wanting to purchase the upgrade.

I sat there all day. I called Neil. I said, “Neil, whatever you’re doing, come on over. Bring your lunch. We’re going to sit and watch the fax machines.” We sat there. We watched all this money pour in. He turned to me and said, “Does this make us a real company?” I said, “Almost, because I knew it was coming.” Six weeks later, we launched our first offer to our customer base to become certified in our software. This offer changed our world completely. In a matter of weeks, we had discovered not just one, but three new revenue streams that we never had before.

They were pumping. At this point, we’re seeing that our accounts were being flooded with millions of dollars. I walked into Neil’s office. I had the quarterly financials in my hand. I dropped them on his desk. I looked at him. I stopped him. He was busy. He looked up and looked at me. I said, “Now, we’re a real company.” That was the moment in time when we had millions in the bank. We had paid off all of our lines of credit. We had audited financial statements. We had fantastic user feedback and overwhelmingly beautiful press from the trade media. We were growing. It couldn’t have been a better time.

Would you like to hear your story?

Yes.

Are We A Real Business Yet?

Are we a real business yet? It is something that my partner and I would joke about each other across our cramped garage office. We had a successful start to our company. Shortly thereafter, things were struggling. We weren’t getting sales. It seemed like the harder we worked, the fewer sales we were getting. I entered this garage office and bumped my head against the spackled ceiling, these little points, these little things. There were several dents in the ceiling that I felt like were definitive of the business that I was in, and I was growing. Is this a real business? We keep bumping our heads. We keep stopping. We keep being halted.

Even though it’s a Sunday afternoon, it is another Sunday of working seven days a week, twelve hours a day. I can look across this tiny garage office to a tiny window and see a serene lake outside. Through the window, I hear some birds chirping and see the golden light moving through the trees and the plants. I’m wondering what I’m missing out on. Is this a real business? Is this real life, working harder and harder, constantly being afraid of whatever can change in the marketplace, the economy, wondering how do I get out of this revenue flatline, and forgetting entirely about why I started this business in the first place? It’s not just to make money, but to live a good life, a fun life?

I can remember after one too many of those Sunday afternoons being too busy to do anything other than be busy, I knew that something needed to change. I didn’t know exactly how this was going to change, but I set out on a journey to figure it out. I wish there were a way to get insight and understanding from the problems and the challenges that I was experiencing from a different perspective. That wasn’t just “Work more. Work harder. Grind harder,” the myths that were so prevalent in the world of entrepreneurship. I wish there was somebody with a depth of experience that could look through everything that I was going on in my business and see the opportunities, the possibilities in a way that I hadn’t looked before.

 

I knew that there were offers that I was sitting on and streams of revenue that were there, but I didn’t have the time and energy to think about or consider these things. Slowly over the course of several years and a lot of costly and painful mistakes, I didn’t find that person, but I became them. I learned how to look at my business through a new set of eyes, not just to work harder, but work smarter and find those ways and possibilities.

Four years after bumping my head on that ceiling and being cramped in this garage office, things had changed. I can remember after working hard and diligently in this program and this software, and sending out thousands of mailings to our current clients and our prospective clients about a new offer, a new possibility. It was up to them to fill out the form that we had mailed out and fax it to us. This new offer was a different stream of revenue, a new way to meet our current customers where they are and to maybe convert customers that hadn’t signed over to us yet. We set up four fax machines to get ready to bring these new clients in. I can remember one morning on my way up to my office and seeing all four fax machines churning out paper.

New orders were coming in. Clients were coming in. They were chugging away. I sat there with my morning coffee and watched the fax machines work. I called over Neil and said, “Bring your lunch over. We don’t need to do anything other than enjoy these fax machines right now.” I can remember sitting there, relaxing, and watching the papers come through. Neil once again asked me, “Are we a real business yet?” I’m tempted to say yes, but I say, “Almost.” A few weeks later, we launched another offer to our customer base. This one changed our world completely. In a matter of weeks and months, but let’s be honest, years of hard work as well, we created a third new revenue stream. Our accounts were filling up.

I can remember gathering up all of the papers, the order, and the data, a handful in my hands, walking into Neil’s office, dropping them on the desk, and saying, “Now, we’re a real company, not because we work hard, but because we paid off our debt. It is because we have happy customers and we have a wonderful press. We continue growing sustainably.” That’s what a real business is, no longer working in fear and uncertainty, but being inspired by what we’re doing. For me, it was being cramped up in this office on another Sunday afternoon, looking out a tiny window, and wondering what else was possible. For you, it could look a little bit different.

A real business allows you to be inspired by what you are doing instead of working in fear and uncertainty. Share on X

You could be working harder and harder, trying to spend more, and trying to throw spaghetti on the wall to find the solution. One thing is for sure. It’s so hard to see our own way through our problems and our challenges. In the next 45 minutes, I’m going to teach you my process that I’ve used to help hundreds of executives, of coaches, and of leaders like you see what they can’t see, monetize more streams of revenue, and create a real business that can grow scalably and allow you to enjoy the life that you’ve worked so hard to create.

That was amazing.

Thank you.

I love that. I was listening to the story, but I was paying attention to the way you structured all of this. To me, it was almost like a waterfall. I could feel the tension building as you were telling my story, until it reached the crescendo to the point where the water goes over the cliff. There’s that feeling, that rush of satisfaction that you got that story right. I could also see how anybody listening to that story could identify with it because they had their own TimeSlips Corporation. They had their own experiences. They probably had an amazing amount of wisdom that they gained through their years of building and scaling their own companies. Now, they see that we’re both coming from the same place. That was beautiful, Kyle. You did a good job.

Thank you so much. This is the feeling that you experienced, although it’s a very interesting experience hearing somebody else tell your story and walk you through it. This is what we need to do and establish at the beginning of a signature talk in order to get people to listen to what we have to say. Too often, we discount these things in exchange for what we have to teach. If we don’t address the emotions and don’t show our audience that we understand them, and most of us try to do the opposite and try to get our audience to understand us first, then we don’t create the connection. It creates the context for what we have to teach that gets people leaning in and imagining working with us as we are teaching.

Speakers must understand their audience first. Otherwise, they cannot build the connection that creates the context for what they want to teach. Share on X

It’s one of the biggest gaps that I see many experts and leaders experiencing, which keeps them usually at about C-minus results on their talks. They probably get a few conversions, but it’s not enough for them to feel like this is something that they should be spending a lot of time on. It usually means that they fall back on whatever fires they need to put out in their business and are working busy, just like you were describing in your story.

Harnessing The Power Of Stories

In hearing you tell the story, coming from you instead of from me, I got to appreciate it more than if I had thought about it myself. When I think about it, it doesn’t strike me. Yes, it was what I went through, and it was part of my past, but when I hear you encapsulate it in the way you do with your formula, it’s much more meaningful to me, too. It was very beautifully done. Let’s talk about the power of stories. I run a certification program. The book, Power Tribes, describes what it is I do when I work with companies and teams to build certification. One of the key things that we do is we must create a community first.

Without building a community, a certification program is nothing more than a business model. As a business model, all it can depend on is revenue. As a community, once you start building that bond between the company, the CEO, and the members of the community, it’s now based on a much higher ground. It’s based on something more important than just money. It’s based on relationships. Help me understand how this story would assist somebody who is building a community to better communicate with the members of that community, assuming they’re already familiar with the company. It’s not an inspirational talk to strangers. How is this positioned in that way?

There are lots of ways that we can use this. There’s not just one kind of these stories. Though many people often refer to this as an origin story, I call them authority stories because it’s not really about your origin as an entrepreneur, but it’s about the origin of the problem. If we think about the origin of the problem in our lives, then we can apply this framework and formula to any problem in any situation.

This is used to create a relationship. In my experience, working with clients and with some of the best podcasters and people that I worked with, the only way to succeed, and this is going to become more important, is by truly relating to your clients. It is by focusing on them, creating a story that serves them instead of trying to serve yourself, trying to share whatever it is that’s exciting to you, and diving into your knowledge and expertise.

By following this formula and framework, we are showing up in service to them. It is the essential ingredient for everything that we do in our marketing, in our relationship development, and in our sales. It’s a way that we can consistently revisit and reuse with whatever problem, with whatever idea, and with whatever thing we are introducing to our audience.

This is step one, I would assume. I have a story. It’s a great way for me to frame a keynote. I know your programs can go very deep and offer so much to business owners. What’s next? After we have this story and integrate it into our signature talk, how do we take this story and parlay it into money, into sales, and into connections that we didn’t have before?

A lot of people, when experiencing what you went through, think that that’s the whole experience and that’s the whole thing. It is just enough to open the door. What I enjoy working with people is strategic teaching. What do we teach and how do we talk about it in a way that’s going to get people imagining what it’s like to work with us? This can make a dramatic difference in what we experience. A lot of us simply think about, “What should I teach?” We talk about what’s made our clients successful in the past.

A lot of us want to add a lot of value. We think that value is created by giving people information on how they can do what we teach and what we promise. Good teaching follows a very specific framework that I also use in an interview-type context to draw out of my clients and share the teaching point in the same way that I share the story, so that they can experience it.

Every good teaching point starts by understanding the biggest objection or limiting belief that our audience is experiencing. I like to create three teaching points in about a 45-minute signature talk. Our origin story, our authority story, is about the first 5 to 7 minutes. Each teaching point is about 7 to 10. If we do our teaching points well, then our offer can be very short and crisp. Another five or so minutes, and we hit that 45-minute mark nicely.

We start with an objection. What’s the biggest limiting belief that your audience is experiencing? Instead of teaching people how to solve the problem that they’re experiencing, we want to teach just one thing that will give them an insight into seeing the problem differently and seeing new possibilities. If we try to teach too much about how, then one of the things that we need to know is that we’re not the first person that our audience has heard speaking on this. If we firehose them with a bunch of information, they’re immediately going to tune out. They’re going to add you as number thirteen to the list of twelve other people that they’ve heard don’t work for them.

Let me give you an example of this. I worked with a woman named Nicole Jardim. She came to me to launch a book called Fix Your Period. She helps women with all kinds of period and hormonal problems get back in control of their lives. We started working on a teaching point together. I asked her, “What’s the first thing that we need to know to fix our periods?” She said, “You need to fix your blood sugar. I know twelve ways to fix your blood sugar.” She started listing them off. There were so many ways. I said, “Stop. Hold on, Nicole. I’m going to pretend to be one of your clients right now.” I’m not a very convincing woman, but maybe with the beard and hormonal problems, it is somewhat convincing.

“Nicole, I’m a hopeless person. I’ve tried all of the diets. I’ve tried all of these things before. I’m exhausted. I feel like I’m giving up on this. I can’t do twelve things, Nicole. I will do one thing. I promise I will do it with my full heart, but it has to be the easiest.” She said, “That’s probably chew your food more, but that’s boring. I say, chew your food more. I can’t share a bunch of science about this. I can’t go into depth and details. Nobody is going to stick around and listen to that.” We challenged this thought and this idea.

This is an example of people relating to themselves inappropriately. What happens when we talk about chewing our food more? If you chew your food more, it activates saliva and allows you to digest your food better. This means that I don’t necessarily have to change my diet to get better results. I’m tired of trying to change my diet all the time. It’s probably important. It is one of the other ways. For now, by listening to Nicole talk about chewing your food a little bit more, I don’t even have to do anything. I’m starting to feel a little bit healthier and a little bit more empowered. That’s the effect that we want to create.

By simply simplifying things like this, by cutting out the eleven other things that she wanted to say, and focusing on the one thing that would open her mind up to new possibilities, she delivered this talk. Instead of firehosing the audience, reading the eighteen bullet points on her slides, and going twenty minutes over before she even gets to her offer, she was having fun on the webinar. She was enjoying herself. She was engaging because she had something simple that she could teach. She knew how and why she was teaching it. It allowed her to be present instead of constantly trying to think about what to say next.

When the book launch came, she had a full program. It filled up very easily. What I did is an example of the third part of a teaching component. We want to tell a story about a client who has experienced this exact problem and presents the objection that we overcame within the story. We teach by teaching our clients and showing them the results that are possible. We can mention whatever we have at the end of our offer or at the end of our presentation. We get to plant a seed and get people imagining what it’s like to work with us in a time where they are taking notes and learning from us. If I were to tell the Nicole story after I make my offer, sign up for my program, and look at the great things I did for Nicole, they’re a little bit skeptical.

Right now, I’m talking about my products and services in a way that feels transparent and valuable, but is also in service to the audience. If we can do this several times throughout our presentation, then by the time we make our offer, it doesn’t have to be so complicated with all these offer stacks. It can be natural and straightforward. By the time we get there, the audience is saying, “I thought you would never mention this,” instead of, “Here we go.”

I love your formula. It reminds me of a can of beer. The reason I say that is because when I was a little boy growing up in Brooklyn, New York, the most popular beer advertised on the radio and television was Rheingold. You probably never heard of Rheingold before. That brand is long gone. It was effectively a small brewery. I believe it was in upstate New York. They were having a problem. They called an ad agency and said, “We need to find a way to increase sales of our beer. What do you have for us? How can we do that?” The guy said, “I’d like to come and visit your brewery and see what you do.”

The guy goes to the brewery. The president meets him at the front door and starts walking him through to the back, where his office is. The ad executive says, “Wait a second. What am I looking at here? It looks like the guts of a starship. What’s going on?” He goes, “These are the tanks where we boil the grain. These are the tanks where the fermentation takes place. Everybody has this. All beer manufacturers, all breweries, have the same setup.” He goes, “Wait a minute. Tell me more.” He got the executive to go into detail about every step of the beer brewing process.

The executive was fascinated because he’d never even seen this before. He said to the CEO of the brewery, ”The reason you’re not selling enough is because no one knows your story. No one knows exactly what you do to brew beer.” He goes, “Like I said, everybody does the same thing.” His answer was, “But nobody tells the story of how.” That completely catapulted Rheingold into the stratosphere. It is with this simple understanding of exactly what they went through, similar to what you took me through, and how they struggled in the beginning to perfect the formula for their magic beer, as it was. I was too young to drink at the time. I don’t remember if I ever tasted it, but it became very popular. It all came down to telling the story.

A Friend On The Other Side

I had that moment where I reflected on that story as you were sharing what I went through when I was starting. I loved the parallel. We’re about to shift to a different segment of the show. For the audience, if this intrigued you so far, hang in there because we have something very special for you coming up soon. Before we go to that, Kyle, I’m going to ask you two questions. You have no idea what these questions are. The answers will be completely spontaneous. If it takes a second or two to think of the answer, that’s okay. Let me know when you’re ready.

I’m ready.

Who in all of space and time would you like to have one hour to enjoy a walk in the park, a quick lunch, or an intense conversation with?

This is an easy one. When I was nineteen years old, just before turning twenty and just before I started on my journey through South America, I enjoyed going to church. I went to a Christian church in Utah, which is a punk rock thing to do in Utah. Most people prefer Mormonism there. At the time of being nineteen, like many nineteen-year-olds, you start getting a little jaded on the institution, but I had a couple of friends. I had one friend in particular who was about three years younger than me. I would be his mentor and counselor at the church camps that we would go to. His name was Paul.

Though I wasn’t attending church as much, and I was trying to move away from things, I was always excited to see him. His sister was the first girl that I took to a dance and probably the first girl that I kissed. I was very close to all of their family. I was always happy to see him. A couple of weeks before I departed for South America, I got a frantic phone call from a girl from the church telling me that Paul had committed suicide.

I remember, about a month later, on a trek to Machu Picchu for the first time, making some decisions. I decided that I didn’t want to believe in God or believe in anything other than my ability to work hard and achieve things. This is the same thing, though. It happens in many different ways that get our wires crossed as entrepreneurs, get us to grind harder, and get us distracted and devaluing ourselves.

I had a hard time understanding the value of my own life and wondered why he was gone and I wasn’t. I have no doubt this would be a factor in my health and my adventures that we’ve already elucidated to some degree earlier on this show. I would very much love to have an hour with Paul and understand where he was going. I’d love to tell him what’s happened since and how his choice impacted me.

I wish I could get him to change his mind. In some ways, like the autoimmune disease going from a curse to a gift, perhaps there are some ways to see even a darkness like this. I know that it has impacted not only my life, but the lives of many people I know. I’m certain that many of the readers have experienced something like this in one form or another. It would be nice to spend some time with him. If nothing else, thank him for the journey that he had set me on or played a part in setting me on.

Thank you for sharing that. That’s a beautiful story. As you probably know, Paul is here right now with us as well. You have access to him anytime you want. He is celebrating not just your success, but your life. He loves you. He asked me to tell you that.

Thank you.

Waking Up The Geniuses Of The World

You’re welcome. Here’s the second question. It’s called the grand finale question, the change-the-world question. I might have an idea of how you’re going to answer this, but I’m going to ask you anyway. What is it that you are doing or would like to do that truly has the potential to literally change the world?

This is also an easy one for me. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. I watch a lot of TED Talks, as you might expect for somebody in my profession. One of the most impactful ones was by a man named Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken Robinson talks about a large problem in the world that very few people notice. There is a different problem called the environmental resources crisis. This is climate change or global warming. There are many different words for it and many different interpretations of it. You can have a conversation with almost anyone about it, and they will understand what you’re talking about and why.

There is an equally pernicious problem called the human resources crisis, which I believe will get worse before it gets better in the coming years. The human resources crisis is something along the lines of this. I believe that there are Einsteins, there are Malalas, there are geniuses, and the leaders. There are Einsteins that are still in the box factory or whatever he did before he became him. There are Malalas that didn’t ever get off the bus and didn’t ever impact people with their story. I believe that we have all of the human capacity to solve the many challenges, not just the environmental resources crisis, but wars, poverty, hunger, and all of the complicated things that make it difficult to feel in alignment as a human.

I believe that we have the ability within us as humans to solve these, but only if we can wake up as many of the geniuses as possible. It is not my role to do this on my own, but it is my role to empower the leaders out there to impact as many of these people as possible and to wake up as many of the people as possible, so that we can end the human resources crisis together. I do believe that even though facing tremendous uncertainty with things like AI and our current economy, our best years are ahead of us as a civilization and as a species of humans. Through empowering leaders, I feel that I’m helping make this world better and bringing that on.

That’s certainly interesting. I had never considered you’d say that. If anybody wanted to learn more about the problem you’re describing, where should they go, or how could they do that?

If you search TED Talks by Sir Ken Robinson, he talks a lot about education. I can’t remember the name of the talk. He might have many by now, but he has several good books and several good talks out there that would be a great place to start.

Kyle’s Books And Free Gift

Thanks for sharing that with us. You’ve written a book or two yourself. What are the names of your books?

I’ve written three. The first is called The College Entrepreneur, which is a little bit different than the rest of my brand. It’s about how a college student can see their education differently, not as simply trying to get good grades and get a degree. It is to use the power of their university to create relationships, build skills, and open doors that are very difficult to do once you’re outside of college. It is how you can use it to grow something more than just a degree while you are in school, and to get your university’s resources to help you along the way. That was my first book that I wrote.

My most successful book has been The Story Engine, which is the name of my podcast and my website, and everything else that I do. This was about my adventures working in a startup, helping create scalable systems to tell their stories through particularly great writing, but any kind of content marketing. This was the foundation of my business. While I work in somewhat different ways these days, it’s still useful and practical in the world.

Finally, my third is Selling With Story, which is a little bit more in line with how to create great talks and how to write and create stories that will help you create results right away. I’m coming out with a fourth one soon. It’s still a couple of months out. I’ve got to scrape together the time to finish. I’ve had a couple of edits of it, and applying those edits and recommendations. I hope it will be my most impactful book yet. It will go through every step of creating a great, high-converting talk and exactly what I do with all of my private clients to help them get 2 to 3 times better results every time they go on stages, podcasts, and webinars with these flexible and simple systems.

Who wouldn’t want that? After all, it sounds like something everybody would not only want, but could benefit from. Kyle, you teased us at the very beginning with this promise of an incredible gift. I know what it is. I know it’s incredible. Tell the audience what it is you have for us.

This is something that I want to use my book to promote and help readers of my book with, so it’s a great place to start. I have an AI authority story creator, which takes people through a very similar process to what you and I went through. Instead of having me there, you have an AI that I’ve trained on hundreds of talks that I’ve written, each of the different frameworks. I’ve used my new book that I’m writing as a guide to train this AI. It will take you through the process of creating an authority story so that you can start implementing everything that we talked about with you and start telling better stories. This was a terrifying thing to release.

I released it earlier in 2025. Within two hours of putting it out there for the first time, I started getting emails from people saying that they were already making more sales from using this tool. That was difficult because I thought I would put myself out of a job by giving away the goods like this. It’s helped more people understand the work that I do. I still think that one thing that AI can’t do very well is challenge your thoughts and assumptions, and lead you to places where you wouldn’t normally go. People get to dip their toes in this process and this experience. A lot of people reach out to move even deeper.

Get In Touch With Kyle

For our audience, you can go to TheStoryEngine.co/Create. That’s where you’ll get access to this very amazing gift. Kyle, if anybody wants to reach out to you directly, what would be the best way to do that?

You can reach me at [email protected]. Let me know that you read about me on Mitch Russo’s show. I spend some time on Instagram @HeyKyleGray or also on LinkedIn @KyleTheGray. Reach out to me on any of those platforms. I would love to hear how this show impacted you. Mitch, thanks for spending so much time with me. This has been an incredibly deep and incredibly insightful conversation. I am so grateful for the process that you went through, that we got to explore a little bit to become who you are, and impact thousands and tens of thousands of coaches and leaders who need your brilliance and expertise.

Thank you, Kyle. Before I let you go, I want to point out that there are very few people in the world who have what I call a unique and powerful conversion of human ability. You’re one of them. There are a few people whom I feel have this unique gift. Your gift in doing what you do helps people beyond business. Once someone understands who they truly are and what their true story is, it also changes their self-esteem. It also affects the way they see the future by knowing that now they can move forward in the future, having fully understood the real lesson of what it was that their experience has brought them. Thank you for bringing this to the world. Thank you for helping me with my story, too.

It’s been a tremendous honor, Mitch. Thank you so much.

I am looking forward to talking to you again soon.

 

Important Links

• ClientFol.io
• ClickCoach: Your Personal Coaching Assistant
• Kyle Gray on LinkedIn
• Dr. Grace Liu on LinkedIn
• The Alchemist
• Power Tribes
• Fix Your Period
• Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! | TED Talk
• The College Entrepreneur
• The Story Engine
• The Story Engine Podcast
• Selling With Story
• AI Authority Story Creator
• Kyle Gray on Instagram

 

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